The Girl and the Stars
It took her forty days, and how she did it is another story in and of itself, but Mokka succeeded, and in saving Zin she opened her womb and became the mother of us all.
* * *
“I CAN STAND now.” Yaz pushed away the hand Erris offered. He might have the strength of the Missing in his arms but she would not allow him to think her weak. Mokka had brought Zin from the belly of the beast and Yaz too had saved a man, bringing Erris from the depths of the void star at the city’s heart and out from far beneath the surface. One day she would show him to the Gods in the Sky. She caught herself thinking of them in the roles of Mokka and Zin and pushed a foolish smile from her face.
“We should go,” Erris said. “There’s nothing here.”
“Apart from enough meat to feed a clan, and just yards away from people so starved their ribs look as if they are trying to escape.” She stood looking at the bulk trapped within the ice before her. “With this the Broken wouldn’t need what the priests send them. They could go for months, years even, without scavenging, without sending iron to the Black Rock. They could make new bargains from a position of strength.”
Erris raised his brows, smiling. “Quite the politician, aren’t you?”
Yaz didn’t know the word but somehow she had a sense of it, presumably from the strangely drawn-out time she’d spent in the void with Erris. “There’s something else.”
“Yes?”
Yaz approached the ice and the behemoth it held. That sense of being watched remained, along with an intense hunger, almost jealousy, as if what watched her envied everything she had, from her star to her skin, and wanted to tear all of it from her. “I didn’t clear them all.”
Erris glanced around. “The ice is clear. And if that whale is a ‘demon’ . . . well, we could be in trouble.”
“It’s not a demon but it’s the perfect place for one to hide.” Yaz summoned the dazzling beam of starlight once more and scanned the whale methodically, straining to see any irregularities. Her strength had started to wane and the agony in her head had built to a crescendo when, as the beam slid yet again through the black-on-black openness of the whale’s toothless mouth, it seemed as though there were something there, a dark star floating as if in the act of being swallowed.
“Found you.” She let the beam linger, seeing in the midst of it a black sphere resisting the light.
“It’s Theus?” Erris asked.
“It’s already lasted longer than any of the others we’ve discovered so far.”
“Shouldn’t you call him then?”
Despite her pain and exhaustion Yaz continued to focus the star’s light on the demon in the whale’s mouth. Part of her wanted to see just how much the thing could take. Another part feared uniting something so powerful with the creature that dwelt inside Thurin. “Is this a good idea, Erris?”
“You’re asking me?” He spread his hands. “This is all new to me. I don’t know any of the people involved. When I was last here”—he swung his arm at the rock and ice—“all this was fields.”
Yaz grudgingly took his point. She went to where the cavern roof lowered before rising into a larger chamber and shouted Theus’s name. Returning to the rear wall of the cave she set her star to melting a path to the demon.
By the time Theus prowled in, with other Tainted haunting the shadows behind him, Yaz had almost reached the resistant clot of darkness and the floor was awash with meltwater. He looked in astonishment at the whale, now lit by the star that had almost entered its mouth.
He recovered himself swiftly. “Another candidate?”
“The strongest so far.” Yaz watched him warily, remembering how swiftly he had set his knife to her throat the first time he showed himself.
“A veritable Jonah,” Theus breathed.
“Who?” Yaz asked.
Theus waved the question away.
Yaz coaxed the star to radiate more heat then had it rise to let the pulse of black water pass beneath it. She had the star follow the water out quickly while Theus strode forward with ill-concealed eagerness to plant both palms into the pooling darkness.
The effect was immediate. Theus stiffened, raising his head to show a strained but rapt expression, the tendons in his neck standing out like cables. He began to suck in an enormous breath, accompanied by a disturbing moan, and the veins in his wrists mottled a greenish black, the colour flowing up toward his elbows before being lost beneath his skins. His body shook and it seemed that even the rock beneath him trembled as if in premonition of some seismic shift.
Yaz’s star burned in her hand now, still uncomfortably hot, and for a mad moment she thought of bringing it down on the back of Theus’s head in an overarm swing. But however terrifying the creature before her might be it was also Thurin, and it would be Thurin’s skull that shattered.
Something was coming. Something big. Racing toward them as if the fields that Erris remembered were all that surrounded them. Yaz found herself needing to breathe yet unable to fill her lungs until the tension, building like a storm cloud piled miles high, finally peaked and broke.
Theus leapt to his feet with arms wide and a scream so loud it seemed it must splinter something vital inside his chest. A shock wave threw Yaz off her feet and staggered Erris. All around them the ice shattered and fell, a white rain turned bloody in the starlight. Yaz found herself on her back with chunks of broken ice hammering all around her. For a moment she thought that the cavern had collapsed and she would lie buried beneath an unknown tonnage of glacier. But the deluge stopped, leaving the rock six inches deep. Some part of whatever energies had been released inside Theus during his reunion must have escaped through Thurin’s ice-work. He stood now, frost in the black of his hair, staring at the hands he had raised before him, as if marvelling at himself, or perhaps just at the new perspective offered to him now that he was one piece closer to something whole.
Yaz got to her feet, shedding sheets of ice fractured from the ceiling. “You got what you wanted. Now give me what you promised.”
Theus raised his head to reveal a face the colour of an old bruise with wholly black eyes and a dangerous grin. “Find another piece of me and then I’ll let them go.”
Yaz woke the star in her hand. “Now!”
Theus flinched but didn’t retreat. “You want this boy that much?” he sneered.
“I want my friends. I want my brother. I want to leave this place and go back up to the ice.” With each “I want” she pushed more light from the star until its heart pounded, close to breaking free.
Theus raised an arm to shield his face and backed a few paces. “Life is easier down here. I was on the ice once.” He sounded surprised to hear himself say it.